Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: Calling the PM to committee

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As the WE Imbroglio continues to roll along in the absence of much other news, there are a couple of new developments – one is that both Seamus O’Regan and Katie Telford, both of whom are subject to the Conflict of Interest Act, also have past histories of raising funds for the WE group of charities pre-government formation, which could complicate things as for whether or not they should have recused themselves from any decision-making over the Student Grants programme contract. The other is that the Conservative are proposing to summon prime minister Justin Trudeau before the finance committee to answer questions about the decision to grand that contract – with the added show of having him do so under oath (which is a bit of extraneous showboating – lying before committee would mean that he would face charges of contempt of parliament, and he has already sworn oaths of office which make demands to testify under oath at committee to be unnecessary). Suffice to say, summoning the prime minister to committee is more fraught than you may think, so here’s professor Philippe Lagassé with some perspective.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1282376899512107008

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Roundup: The WE Imbroglio worsens

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Because the Liberals’ capacity for self-harm wasn’t apparent enough already, it seems that they decided to find yet another rake to step on as the WE Imbroglio continues to unfold, and we learned that two of Bill Morneau’s children have done work for WE – one of them as a salaried employee, and no, Morneau also did not recuse himself from any Cabinet discussions or decisions when it came to awarding WE the student service grant contract. Because of course he didn’t.

Within the Liberal ranks, so far only Nathaniel Erskine-Smith – already considered a “maverick” – has come out to say that he’s not keen on what has transpired, which makes me wonder how many other Liberal MPs feel similarly but just aren’t saying out of a sense of loyalty or because they would rather close ranks at a time like this. Of course, if we had a properly functioning Westminster democracy in this country, the caucus could get together and say “You know what – the leader keeps hurting the party with these self-inflicted wounds, so maybe it’s time we find a new leader,” and within a few days, they could have voted out Trudeau and voted on a replacement from within the caucus ranks, and then it would be off to Rideau Hall to swear in a new prime minister, who hopefully wouldn’t be a prone to stepping on those rakes. But we don’t have a properly functioning system because the Liberals and the pundit class back in 1919 decided it was somehow “more democratic” to give the party membership the ability to decide on the leadership, and suddenly the accountability of that leader to his or her caucus was annihilated. Now we have leaders who have centralized all power and authority and who are accountable to no one, so that when they cause trouble for their parties, the caucus is now stuck. (It would also help in keeping the party from becoming a personality cult of the current leader because that leader is easily replaced, but again, that’s no where we’re at in this country, and we are paying the price for it.

As for the Conservatives, they decided that they needed to up the stakes and send a letter to the RCMP to demand a criminal investigation of this contract, under the flimsiest of pretences. It’s ludicrous, of course, but what it allows them to do is to insinuate that the RMCP are investigating when they likely aren’t because they’re not public about what they are and are not investigating, and they can spend the summer asking Trudeau “have the RCMP contacted you yet?” and posting those clips all over their social media channels. We’ve seen this particular play before, and it wasn’t great the first time, and this iteration won’t have improved either. I suspect there is also an element of “lock her up!” as part of their calculation for this, because they know that there is an element of their base that will respond to this bit of red meat, and they can’t help themselves, no matter how corrosive this is to our political discourse, or the long-term the damage that it causes.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt hears from Erskine-Smith and other unnamed Liberals who are balking at how closed-off to caucus Trudeau has been, and how that breeds these kinds of problems. Chris Selley marvels at Trudeau’s trilogy of scandals, and the ways in which they are continually minimized.

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Roundup: Hot and Bothered for Basic Income

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The idea of a Basic Income has been a hobby-horse of parliamentarians for a while, and yesterday the Parliamentary Budget Officer came out with a report that purported to cost one out in a couple of different scenarios. But it’s a bit of a horror show of a report because what it’s actually describing is a cash transfer and not an actual Basic Income scheme, and more than that, some of the things it purports to strip in order to pay for its high price tag are a number of disability supports. Remember that while a Basic Income may sound like a left-wing idea, there is plenty of right-wing support for it if it dismantles the welfare state, where replacing tailored disability programmes with a one-size-fits-all cash transfer is a feature and not a bug. (More from economist Mike Moffatt here).

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280537746881212422

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1280630991661535238

Suffice to say, this report got some senators all hot and bothered, including Senator Yuen Pau Woo, who put out a press release on the topic, calling for a pilot project, so here’s Lindsay Tedds, who worked on BC’s Basic Income project for the last two years, and who knows a thing or two about Basic Income.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280562781142388736

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Roundup: Armed intruder at Rideau Hall

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The big excitement for the day was that there was an Incident at Rideau Hall first thing in the morning, as a Canadian Forces member, who was armed, crashed his truck through the gates of the compound and headed over to Rideau Hall on foot, where he was then apprehended by RCMP in what sounds like a two-hour “dialogue.” Apparently he wanted to “send a message” to the prime minister – who wasn’t at home at nearby Rideau Cottage at the time, nor was the Governor General in Rideau Hall (but if you recall, she has consistently refused to move into the residence there, preferring to stay at Rideau Gate). He was arrested without incident, and has apparently made online posts about a supposed COVID-19 conspiracy theory – and it comes just a day after anti-lockdown protests were happening on Parliament Hill, featuring a former has-been wannabe party leader who shall not be named, and some of the images seen on the Hill included those of Trudeau being hanged, while others touted these kinds of COVID conspiracies. So that’s fun.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1278788951885721602

Meanwhile, over in Alberta, the rhetoric about the plan to hold a referendum on equalization rolls along, so here is political scientist Melanee Thomas to spill some tea about just exactly what they are talking about, and why the arguments aren’t as clever as they think they are.

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Roundup: No to hostage diplomacy, yes to dubious administration

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau held his no-longer-daily presser at Rideau Cottage today, and finally unveiled the Canada Service Grant programme for student and recent graduate volunteers, where every hundred hours of volunteering earns them $1000. On top of that, he announced some $40 million for Mitacs internships, and 100,000 new summer job placements as the programme has apparently become fully subscribed, along with another 20,000 post-secondary job placements. While the Q&A touched on the problem with the rent subsidies where businesses re-opening can earn too much to qualify, and long-term care – where he bluntly stated that provinces failed to support seniors but that the federal government was happy to help where they could – it was the subject of China’s hostage diplomacy that dominated, as reporter after reporter kept asking him over, and over, and over again about that letter signed by prominent Canadians to essentially capitulate to the Chinese and end the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in exchange for the release of the Two Michaels. In language that was almost uncharacteristically blunt for Trudeau, he said that he deeply disagreed with the letter-writers, citing that giving in now would send the message to everyone that they could simply kidnap Canadians in order to get diplomatic concessions going forward, and it would endanger the safety of those Canadians going forward.

But back to that Canada Service Grant announcement, because what wasn’t announced during the presser and only came out later was the fact that they have turned over the administration of this grant to WE Charities, which is…problematic, not only because of the personal connection that Trudeau and his wife has with the group. We don’t know what kind of cut WE is getting for doing the work, and the fact that one of their main sources of income – their big stadium events – is off the table for the sake of the pandemic, this almost has the feel of Trudeau doing them a favour because they’ve lost that revenue, which is poor optics. Trust this government to step on a rake and evaporate good will that they’ve accumulated by making this kind of dumb move. It happens over and over again (and yet nobody seems to lose their job over it).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1276314924793450497

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Roundup: Manufacturing an “attendance” record

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The big headline that everyone was talking about yesterday was a load of manufactured bullshit, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but it was what everyone was throwing around nevertheless. The Globe and Mail crunched the numbers from the Zoom log-ins from the special COVID-19 committee that has been sitting in lieu of regular House of Commons sittings, and found that lo, the Conservatives had the worst “attendance record.” Which is kind of hilarious because it completely misunderstands how this whole farcical process works. Oh, but the Conservatives must be hypocrites, because they’re demanding full sittings! Well, no – you’ve just found some numbers that you’re applying disingenuously in order to make them look like hypocrites. It’s exactly the kind of stunt that causes people – and small-conservatives especially – to distrust the mainstream media, because it looks an awful lot like they’re not being given a fair shake. Of course, Andrew Scheer didn’t do himself any favours when he called it “Liberal spin” rather than pointing out that this was a false construction, but his inability to do anything other than meathead partisan talking points was and still is his downfall.

Why this is such bad-faith “reporting” is because it ignores the fact that there is a set speaking list every day. If you’re an MP – particularly a Conservative MP in a rural riding where you have spotty Internet to begin with – what incentive is there for you to log into Zoom and watch it that way when you have no chance to participate when you can simply follow the proceedings on CPAC and get a better experience because the translation tends to work better? It also operates on the assumption that all 338 MPs are in the House of Commons at all times when Parliament is sitting regularly, which isn’t the case – the only time all MPs are in the Chamber are during Question Period and for votes, and no, despite the sales job that the government has been trying to foist onto the public, this committee is not Question Period. Trying to hand out attendance awards for participating in a Zoom call on steroids is a waste of everyone’s time and resources, and is a distraction from the actual issues related to the calls to have proper in-person sittings – or it would be if the majority of media outlets could actually report critically on it rather than swallowing the government’s lines.

Speaking of outrage clicks, the CBC has again been misrepresenting some Senate matters, like how the Selection Committee works, as part of their story wherein Senator Dalphond is calling for committee chairs and deputy chairs to rescind their “bonuses” in the current session because of many haven’t sat because of the pandemic. But it occurs to me that it’s unlikely that chairs have even been getting their stipends because most committees haven’t even been constituted yet, which makes this look even more like this is part of Dalphond’s particular vendetta against Senator Yuen Pau Woo, and Woo’s insistence on chairing the Selection Committee, and he’s trying to use a larger point about chairs’ salaries (using false comparisons with the House of Lords as ammunition) in order to provide cover from making this look personal. I am becoming extremely concerned about Dalphond’s behaviour here – though my disappointment with how the CBC covers the Senate is pretty much standard. Cheap outrage clicks on the backs of misrepresenting the Senate is par for the course for how journalism runs in this town. (I wrote more on the backstory here).

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Roundup: Another shooting, another investigation

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The conversation about systemic racism in policing continued over the weekend with news of another fatal shooting by policing of an Indigenous man, again in New Brunswick for the second time in a week. Both incidents seem to involve a mental health crisis situation (and a knife appears to have been involved in both cases), but it continues to point to the fact that the police are not the right people to call in such a situation because they don’t have adequate training to deal with these cases. There is a question as to why the crisis intervention units that are available in the province weren’t called in to deal with the situation – whether there is a lack of training or awareness, or if this becomes a situation where the police culture of trying to seek dominance in a situation kicks in rather than thinking it through (with especially fatal consequences for Black and Indigenous people). Nevertheless, the fact that there were two incidents in a single week should be proof enough for anyone who remains unconvinced by the scope and magnitude of the problem that this is something that needs to be addressed.

Meanwhile, it looks like Bill Blair had a conversation with RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki before she changed her tune about systemic racism in the ranks, but that changed tune and the damage control that flowed from it has now angered the association of RCMP veterans, which is falling back on the same lines about good people being tarred, because they apparently haven’t kept up with the pace of the conversation and what everyone has been pointing out to them the whole time. And while AFN National Chief says that we need to move beyond questioning whether systemic racism exists and act on eliminating it, I think we need to recognize that it’s important that we are finally calling it what it is – and this as we have pundits muttering about how we shouldn’t spend so much time on labelling it than on combatting it, but if we can’t call it what it is, then we can’t do what needs to be done to actually fix it.

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Roundup: Damage control and lunatic accusations

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For his Friday presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau was back at Rideau Cottage, and he started off with the news that the Canadian Forces deployments to long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec would be extended until June 26th, but that the plan was to start transitioning to more assistance from the Canadian Red Cross. He mentioned the call with the premiers on Thursday night, which by all accounts got pretty testy, but Trudeau stuck to generalities. He raised the arrest video of Chief Allan Adam, saying he was shocked and that there needed to be an independent investigation, and that policing reforms across the country needed to happen soon. Finally, he mentioned that temperature checks would be implemented on flights, which raised all kinds of questions of faux-confusion that we were told that this was ineffective in detecting COVID-19 – which is true, but it was explained about eleventy times that this was simply an added measure of protection to keep people with fevers off of flights. (And lo, the pundits who seem incapable of thinking critically about public health advice have been decrying this as “added confusion,” which it’s not really). During the Q&A, Trudeau was also asked about the blood donation ban for men who have sex with men, given that NDP MP Randall Garrison has been agitating about this recently, and Trudeau reiterated the government’s position that they were funding the science that would ensure it was safe to end the ban, that they reduced it from a permanent ban to a three-month ban, and that he hoped for a positive announcement soon.

Later in the day, we saw a flurry of damage control out of the RCMP, as Commissioner Brenda Lucki clarified that yes, there is systemic racism in the Force and she should have been clearer about that, and that she has to ensure policing free of bias. As well, the Alberta Deputy Commissioner, who previously denied that systemic racism exists in the Force, said that he’s learned a lot in the past few days and he too will now admit that it exists, and promised to help eliminate it – as calls for his resignation have been mounting. Meanwhile, Winnipeg police tried to get ahead of a story with a video that showed four police grappling with, kicking, and Tasering someone during an arrest, which they insisted was someone who was violent and high on meth – but seemed incapable of admitting that it looks like more police brutality.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have been trying to make an Issue of the fact that foreign affairs minister François-Philippe Champagne *gasp* has a $1.2 million mortgage for two London properties from a Chinese bank, that predated his time in politics. The mortgages were fully disclosed, and neither the Ethics Commissioner, CSIS or the RCMP seemed to think this was a big deal when he was either elevated to Cabinet or shuffled to his current portfolio, but now the Conservatives are accusing him of being compromised, and going easy on China – to the point that they have insinuated that he is letting the two Michaels languish in a Chinese prison – because of these mortgages. It’s a position that is ludicrously insulting because the worst thing that this Chinese Bank could do is demand immediate repayment (unlikely given the rules for financial institutions in the UK), and Champagne could have to sell those properties, which, given that property in the UK has appreciated rapidly, he could make a tidy profit. More to the point, that same Chinese bank has been operating in Canada since 1993 and had $3 billion on the books here, and there was nary a peep about it from the Conservatives in the nine years they were in power. But logic and common sense are not in play, and instead they are demanding that the Canada-China special committee be reconstituted and Champagne be hauled before it to answer about this, which is starting to reek of a McCarthy-era witch hunt, because they can’t help but engage in meathead partisanship.

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Roundup: An admission of systemic racism in Canada

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser was held away from Rideau Cottage yesterday, at a local business that benefitted from the wage subsidy, and it was remarked that it looked to be suspiciously like a campaign stop. Trudeau did his best to try and deflect blame for losing at political chicken – err, Wednesday’s inability to get the government’s latest emergency omnibus bill passed, outlining all of the places where items in the bill matched the demands of opposition parties, while dismissing some of the criticisms – primarily that of the Conservatives in their insistence on having full parliamentary sittings restored. The more memorable moment, however, was when he was asked about RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s comments that seem to dismiss systemic racism in the RCMP (though she did cop to unconscious bias), where Trudeau said that of course there is systemic racism in the RCMP, just like there is in all of our institutions, and that systems are not broken, but were in fact built that way. He went on to say that part of why it’s difficult to address is because it’s in the building blocks of these institutions, which should serve as a reminder to everyone that there are no quick fixes to any of this. He also went on to say that Canadian exceptionalism isn’t just that we do well, but that we know we need to do better and are willing to address it. This is probably the first time that a head of government has made this kind of an admission, and an acknowledgment of concepts that many Canadians are still coming to terms with – but he also did say that he had faith in Lucki to do the job of reforming the RCMP, so there’s that.

On the subject of the RCMP, Indigenous services minister Marc Miller is not having any of Commissioner Lucki’s excuses about not understanding systemic racism, and is critical that not enough has been done to combat it over the past two years. AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde says that the federal government’s complacency allows police violence against Black and Indigenous people, and he’s right. And lo and behold, the dashcam footage of Chief Allan Adam’s arrest has been made public, and it is hard to see how senior RCMP officials could have concluded that the actions were “appropriate,” which is a big flashing indicator of a problem in the ranks.

Meanwhile, as the debate on bringing back Parliament properly progresses with Trudeau’s disingenuous excuses, Conservative House leader Candice Bergen has put forward a number of suggestions for how MPs could safely vote in-person in a returned Parliament – some of which I’m not in favour of, but at least it’s a better solution than the Pandora’s Box of remote or electronic votes, which the government favours – and make no mistake, they are an evil that will be unleashed and there will be no going back. (I have more on this in my weekend column, out later today).

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Roundup: Bad-faith grievance narratives and faux confusion

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The day started off on something of a petulant tone, as Andrew Scheer complained that people were “upset and confused” by prime minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to attend the Black Lives Matter protest in spite of the pandemic, and furthered the bad faith grievance narrative by pointing to the Ottawa restaurant that was fined $880 for opening its patio. Scheer, and other Conservatives, spent the day obscuring the difference between what the federal government is in charge of and what falls under local public health guidelines, and deliberately playing up this “confusion” where none should actually exist – there were public health guidelines that said that if people were going to protest that they should wear masks and social distance, and then self-isolate afterward, if anyone bothered to pay attention.

Trudeau was up shortly thereafter for his daily presser, and he talked at length about those protesting, and people being afraid of the police, and that he promised to deal with systemic racism and listed actions that his government has taken to thus far to deal with it, including mental health resources for the Black community, an anti-racism secretariat and strategy under the Minister of Diversity, and agreed that it’s not enough. He also said that he has been in discussions with Cabinet, as well as the RCMP commissioner, and that he was also raising the issue of body cameras with premiers this week. Trudeau also mentioned that Bill Blair was following through on their commitment to Indigenous policing, and that this week the government would be undergoing a stock-taking on their reconciliation efforts with Indigenous people. He then pivoted to the wage subsidy and other measures being taken to help people, the $14 billion being offered to help provinces with their economic restarts, and finally announced that they had introduced a number of limited exemptions at the border for immediate family members of Canadians to cross – spouses, children, parents of minor children in Canada – but that they must still self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival. During the Q&A, he defended his attending the protests as balancing competing interests.

On body cameras, it looks like the RCMP has agreed to outfit some members with them, but it remains a controversial move, that may be seen as a band-aid solution to deeper problems. (Here’s a good thread by lawyer Michael Spratt to that effect). It’s also pointed out that if we want to shift resources away from the current model of policing, this is a big expense that makes it even harder to do so.

As the talk of the defunding/abolishing police gains momentum, here is a look at how Camden, New Jersey, has been doing an experiment in scrapping their police force and starting over, and some of the more important things to realize in his are that the incentives changed – not judging performance by the number of arrests or tickets issued, and a focus on making connections in communities. Of course, it also says that they haven’t made enough investments in the other community supports that are supposed to underpin this model, so that’s something to think about.

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